Advertising dollars are swiftly moving off age-old (emphasis on *old*) platforms like the television and print and onto the Internet. The contemporary radio moguls, like the record and movie industry execs before them, are in denial and are starting to protect their precious turf instead of innovating to keep customers. Innovation is just too hard, you know, so they'll fight all the battles before acknowledging that the war has been lost. A broken record from earlier struggles, really (no pun intended).

Advertising dollars will continue to shift to more relevant mediums or they'll be forced to become more relevant to consumers on the current medium. This is why Google bought dMarc broadcasting -- to inject its success into a dinosaur medium like terrestrial radio and make consumers actually care about listening to ads again. But there are more fires in the kitchen here. Let me give you an example here of a personal nature.

Recently I've tried both XM Radio and Sirius in my vehicle with some of the newer "plug-n-play" radios. While I liked the content on Sirius more (like all the college football games being broadcast!), in the end I chose -- like millions of others, most likely -- to listen to just a handful of stations. When I couldn't find anything on I liked, I switched to a CD. There's the pinch -- trying to be relevant to all listeners all the time is impossible. My solution? Jettisoning both radios for auction on eBay, closing both accounts, buying a new (and dirt cheap) flash-drive MP3 player that plugs into the auxiliary jack on my car stereo and listening to all my music for free, how I want and when I want. I'll even record Internet broadcasts directly into MP3 files to use in the car now. Like I said -- the content I want when I want it (with, gasp, no cost attached!).

Things like audio books and podcasts aren't on satellite radio yet. Now, if I could have purchased some satellite radio stations "a la carte", I would have stayed. But paying $13 per month and not needing 95% of the content was a total waste, I figured. I am sure the satellite radio (and television) execs will cry that a la carte pricing would destroy their companies. This may be true, but using the oldest pricing and business model in the book for content availability is *not* innovative. Hence, my dilemma.

Moral of the story? Relevance to each customer is of utmost importance -- in content, advertising and everything else. Will this force innovation? It better, because with all the talk of content protection and the shifting of ad dollars here and there, the consumer now has more choices than ever.

Google's attempt to start exploring non-web based advertising revenue streams has begun in vehicle country, Detroit. Google's purchase of dMarc broadcasting this past January is allowing the web search giant to fuse its immensely-profitable AdSense platform for the web onto the traditional ratio atmosphere. With Google being so good at matching relevancy for advertisers on the web, doing even close to the same thing with automated radio relevant advertising may signal a new age for the Google folks, as millions of people daily listen to terrestrial-based radio.

Will Google's relevancy approach revolutionize the way radio airtime is sold for advertising purposes? This is a huge unknown right now, but if any one entity could pull it off, it would be Google. More advertisers could come back to traditional radio to find newly-relevant customers coming their way, and ad dollars that have shifted off traditional networks like television and newspaper and onto the web could pause for a moment while radio makes a sort-of advertising comeback.

Since the dMarc system automates the buying, placing and tracking of radio ads, the challenge for Google will try to make radio ads bought from Google to be as uniquely relevant as its web-based ads are when a user performs a web search. There is one stark difference, though: the web is two-way interactive -- radio is one-way only. For now.